किसी की याद किसी को आई

A duet by Hamida Banu and Chitalkar — the playback name under which the film's composer C. Ramchandra sang — from Nagma-e-Sahra (1945), with words by Ehsan Rizvi. It is the best-attested song of the film after the coronation number: both singers are documented in the HFGK-derived catalogues, and hindigeetmala's page for the film carries it twice, once with a separate rating, suggesting it circulated as the record most people asked for.

The recording has not been located, so the setting cannot be described. The credit itself is the notable thing: a composer singing the male half of his own duet. C. Ramchandra kept 'Chitalkar' strictly for singing, and he used it often enough on his own scores that his voice, rather than a hired one, is a recurring feature of his 1940s work — the habit that would later put him inside 'Shola Jo Bhadke' and the Albela songs.

Kisi ki yaad kisi ko aayi — someone was remembered by someone. Both parties are left unnamed by the grammar itself, and this is not vagueness but etiquette: the indefinite kisi is the standard Urdu-Hindi device for saying 'you' and 'I' in company, so that a declaration can be made in public without either person being compromised by it. Ehsan Rizvi builds the whole line on that pronoun, and the fact that it is set as a duet doubles the joke — two people sing about two unnamed people, and everyone listening knows exactly who is meant.

Nagma-e-Sahra was Bhagwan Dada's own production, made at Jagriti Pictures and premiered in Bombay on 22 December 1945. Hamida Banu's presence on it is a direct consequence of that ownership: it was Bhagwan who had recommended the young Lahore-born singer to C. Ramchandra earlier in the decade, and by 1945 she was his composer's most-used voice, taking four of the seven songs on this soundtrack. A romantic duet between the film's leading pair — Master Vithal's Feroz and Khurshid Jr.'s Nargis — is the obvious picturisation, though no print survives to confirm it.

Nothing of the recording is known to circulate. Its lasting value is as evidence: a documented Hamida Banu–Chitalkar duet from 1945 marks an early point on the line that runs to Albela (1951), where the same composer's voice and the same producer-director's instincts produced one of the decade's biggest song successes. Hamida Banu herself left for Pakistan in 1956; this film belongs to the Bombay half of a career that ended at Radio Lahore.